Wendell Berry, American writer, poet, and environmentalist has died, aged 92. The Kentucky-born native celebrated the farming world of his home state and warned about the excess of a voracious modern society obsessed with growth at all costs. The literary world remembers Berry as a prolific writer who published more than 40 books, including novels, the short story collection Stand By Me, and the anthology A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997. His writings were consistently tied to his farm home alongside the Kentucky River, where he lived a rustic life with his wife Tanya without a television, telephone, or computer. In prose and poetry that mirrored the uncluttered and deeply felt life he advocated, Berry challenged modern assumptions about prosperity and happiness. “Increasingly over the last maybe 40 years, the thought has come out to me that the old world in which our people lived by the work of their hands, close to weather and earth, plants and animals, was the true world,” he wrote in his 2006 novel Andy Catlett: Early Travels. He added: (the) new world of cheap energy and every cheaper money, honored greed, and dreams of liberation from every restraint is mostly theater.”
Berry’s literally down-to-earth approach to living, was born out of the poverty that came like a hangover from the excesses of the gilded age that led to the Great Depression. “The world I knew as a boy was flawed, surely, but it was substantial and authentic. The households of my grandparents seemed to breathe forth a sense of the real cost and worth of things. Whatever came, came by somebody’s work.”
As a teenage, Berry enrolled in a military institute and entered the University of Kentucky where he studied English, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in 1956 and a Master of Arts (M.A.) in 1957. By his early 20s, he was publishing poems and stories, earning a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University in 1958. After living in New York in the early 1960s, he returned to Kentucky and settled there, devoting his life to writing about nature, farm life, the environment and the ills of modern society – all done on his trusty typewriter even when the computer became ubiquitous. His writings garnered him many honors, including a National Humanities Medal and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2016, he was presented with a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle.
The Presence of Still Waters: The Voice of Wendell Berry
“And so I go into the woods. As I go in under
the trees, dependably, almost at once,
and by nothing I do, things fall into place.
I enter an order than does not exist outside,
in the human spaces. I feel my life take
its place among the lives – the trees, the
annual plants, the animals and birds,
the living of all these and the dead – that go
and have gone to make the life of the earth.”
From A Native Hill, a 1968 autobiography by Wendell Berry.
***
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s
lives may be, I go and lie down where the
wood drake rests in his beauty on the water,
and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence
of still water. And I feel above me
the day-blind stars waiting with their light.
For a time I rest in the grace of the world,
and am free.
From Collected Poems (North Point Press), © 1985.
Listen to Wendell Berry read this poem